Ghana Trip Three - The Rotary Global Grant Experience

One of the major focuses of this trip is putting into place what we need to win a Rotary International Global Grant to fund the Theodora Project.

Rotary has a wide variety of grant opportunities. But the Global Grant is a vehicle that allows you to leverage the money you can raise by a couple of multiples. So if you raise a dollar in donation, you could end up with two to three dollars total for your project from the matching funds available from. However to successfully do this, Rotary requires you to design your project and submit your rant request in a certain way.

There are a lot of good reasons for this. Rotary wants to make sure that the project is well thought through. They want to know that you have done your homework and the community you propose to serve is fully committed to the project as well as. They are demanding as to the types of activities they want to support and the manner in which the project will be supported. And they want to see how the project is going to be sustainable...meaning the project should be able to continue even after the Rotary involvement stops. 

In our case, a lot of the points that are important to Rotary were a part of project design from the very beginning. For example Rotary wants to see performance benchmarks used as a means controlling funds disbursed during the project. That was already a part of our plan. The sustainability issue mentioned above was already built. As was our serving of specific target populations Rotary wishes to serve.

There were two major components we were lacking - a local club that would be the Host sponsoring the project and a community assessment that needed to follow specific approved methodologies. I had talked to a number of clubs and we have been very fortunate that one club has a senior member who knows my partner GG quite well and a President who has 1) gone through the Global Grheant process and has some experience dealing with our target audience. So great thanks to the Rotary Club of Accra East for partnering up with us.

The issue of the community assessment really took some thinking. To be blunt sex work is usually an aspect of society that most like to ignore or pretend is not there. So there was a question as to what 'population' we needed to assess. As Rotary wants to make sure that the community being served is fully bought in and committed, clearly our small group that will be our initial participants can be considered a community. There is also a wider group that GG works with that is not a part of the initial group that can be considered part of the community. Finally we decided we needed some way of assess the overall community of Accra. Via one of the people I am mentoring, we located a researcher who is willing to take on the project. We will be using a focus group for the two initial groups and a survey plus a focus group from the last.

As I am ending up this trip, the major required components of our Global Grant request are falling into place.